32

essay

feature

interview

reviews

the
cybernetics
scare and
the origins of
the internet
By slava gerovitch
illustrations Ragni svensson

In the late 1950s, as Soviet society began

to shed the legacy of Stalinism, science
and engineering became new cultural
icons. The new, post-Stalin generation
was fascinated with Sputnik, nuclear
power stations, and electronic digital
computers. The popular image of an
objective, truth-telling computer became
a vehicle for a broad movement among
scientists and engineers calling for
reform in science and in society at large.
Under the banner of cybernetics, this
movement attacked the dogmatic notions
of Stalinist science and the ideologyladen discourse of the Soviet social
sciences.
Proposed originally in 1948 by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener as a science of control and communication in the animal and the machine,1 cybernetics acquired a much wider interpretation in the Soviet
context. Soviet cyberneticians aspired to unify diverse
cybernetic theories elaborated in the West control
theory, information theory, automata studies and
others in a single overarching conceptual framework, which would serve as the foundation for a general methodology applicable to a wide range of natural
and social sciences and engineering.2

The more Soviet society departed from Stalinism,

the more radical the cybernetic project became. Step
by step, Soviet cyberneticians overturned earlier ideological criticism of mathematical methods in various
disciplines, and put forward the goal of cybernetization of the entire science enterprise. Under the umbrella of cybernetics, scientific trends that had been
suppressed under Stalin began to emerge under new,
cybernetic names, and began to defy the Stalin-era
orthodoxy. Biological cybernetics (genetics) challenged the Lysenkoites in biology, physiological cybernetics opposed the Pavlovian school in physiology, and
cybernetic linguistics (structuralism) confronted
traditional comparative philology and historical linguistics. Soviet cybernetics enthusiasts set the goal of
achieving a comprehensive cybernetization of modern science by representing the subject of every discipline in a unified, formalized way and by moving toward a synthesis of the sciences. They aspired to translate all scientific knowledge into computer models and
to replace the ideology-laden, vague language of the
social and life sciences with the precise language of
cybernetics.
The global aspirations of Soviet cybernetics drew on
the rich and seemingly universal cybernetic language,
which I call cyberspeak. It emerged in the cybernetics circle of Wiener and his colleagues, as they met
regularly over the course of ten meetings sponsored by

the Macy Foundation in 19461953. The participants of

these meetings included mathematicians, engineers,
philosophers, neurophysiologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, biologists, linguists, and social scientists,
among them Claude Shannon, John von Neumann,
Warren McCulloch, William Ross Ashby, Roman Jakobson, and Gregory Bateson.3

The cyberneticians put forward a wide range

of human-machine analogies: the body as a feedbackoperated servomechanism, life as an entropy-reducing
device, man as an information source, human communication as transmission of encoded messages, the human brain as a logical network, and the human mind
as a computer. This assembly of mathematical models,
explanatory frameworks, and appealing metaphors
presented a rather chaotic and eclectic picture. What
held it together was a set of interdisciplinary connections: the same mathematical theory described feedback in control engineering and noise reduction in
communication engineering; information theory was
linked to thermodynamics, as information was equated with negative entropy; information was interpreted as a measure of order, organization, and certainty,
while entropy was associated with chaos, noise, and
uncertainty; brain neurons were modeled as logical elements; and thinking was likened to computation.

Norbert Wiener. Wunderkind, who died at the entrance to the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

During the Cold War, the Soviets lauded the coming capabilities of cybernetics. And people were scared to death of it.

33

34

essay

Cyberneticians combined concepts from physiology

(homeostasis), psychology (behavior and goal), control
engineering (control and feedback), thermodynamics
(entropy and order), and communication engineering (code, information, signal, and noise), and generalized each of them to be equally applicable to living
organisms, self-regulating machines (such as servomechanisms and computers), and human society. In
their view, machines, organisms, and human society
were all seen as self-organizing control systems, which,
operating in a certain environment, pursued their goals
(hitting a target, increasing order, achieving better
organization, or reaching the state of equilibrium) by
communicating with this environment, that is, sending
signals and receiving information about the results of
their actions through feedback loops.
machine
human
society
signal

communication

free press

information

meaning

free speech

system

physiology

self-organization homeostasis

economy
democracy

regulation

thinking

management

computer

brain

government

Upon its publication in 1948, Wieners Cybernetics

gained enormous popularity. The New York Times
called it one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, comparable in significance to the works of
Galileo, Malthus, Mill, or Rousseau. Cybernetics promised solutions to a wide range of social, biological, and
technological problems through information processing and feedback control. Complex social and biological phenomena looked simpler and more manageable
when described in cybernetic terms. Masking the differences in the nature and scale of those phenomena,
the common cybernetic language allowed one to use
the same mathematical techniques across a wide range
of disciplines. When translated into cyberspeak, biological, technological, and social problems all seemed
to have similar cybernetic solutions. Taking cybernetic metaphors literally, many biologists and social
scientists pushed the boundaries of cybernetics even
further than Wiener and his colleagues originally envisioned.
With the wide introduction of electronic digital
computers, Wieners original parallels between thinking and analog computing expanded to include digital
computers. Speaking of human thought as computation and describing digital computers in anthropomorphic terms as giant brains4 became two sides of
the same coin, brought into wide circulation by cybernetics. Scientific American published an accessible account of cybernetics under the provocative title Man
Viewed as a Machine5; and philosopher Frank H.
George threw a challenge to the readers of the English

the cybernetics
scare and
the origins
of the internet

journal Philosophy: you cant tell me anything that

your wife can do that a machine cant (in principle).6
Political scientists spoke of the cybernetic nerves of
government,7 engineers, economists, and journalists
described the bright technological future populated
with intelligent robots,8 and business consultants began to sell management cybernetics.9

Ironically, Wiener, who was hailed as a prophet

of the new age of automatic machinery, held ambivalent views about the social implications of cybernetics.
He regarded automatic machines as both threat and
promise.10 Wiener proclaimed the advent of the second industrial revolution, which would bring about
fully automated factories running without human agency. This revolution, in his view, carried great possibilities for good and for evil.11 Cybernetic techniques and
technologies, he argued, open to us vistas of a period
of greater plenty than the human race has ever known,
although they create at the same time the possibility of
a more devastating level of social ruin and perversion
than any we have yet known.12 Wiener warned that automation was bound to devalue the human brain.13
The skilled scientist and the skilled administrator may
survive, he wrote, but the average human being of

mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that it

is worth anyones money to buy.14 Wiener was deeply
critical of capitalist America. He did not believe in the
ability of the invisible hand of free market to establish an economic and social equilibrium, or homeostasis in cybernetic terms. His social outlook was overtly pessimistic: There is no homeostasis whatever. We
are involved in the business cycles of boom and failure,
in the successions of dictatorship and revolution, in the
wars which everyone loses.15
Cybernetics, in Wieners view, provided hope for
social change. Two years after Cybernetics, he published the book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, in which he developed a cybernetic
critique of the pervasive controls over social communication under McCarthyism in America and under
Stalinism in Russia. He believed that describing society
in cybernetic terms as a self-regulating device would
make it clear that controlling the means of communication was the most effective and most important
anti-homeostatic factor, which could drive society out
of equilibrium.16 Wiener noted that on both sides of the
Atlantic political leaders may attempt to control their
populations by manipulating information flows, and
argued that it is no accident that Russia has had its
Berias and that we have our McCarthys.17 His views of

And in the U.S., Wiener appeared to be a critic of capitalism.

capitalism and communism were best summarized by

his colleague and friend Dirk Struik: plague on both
your houses.18
It was profoundly ironicand illustrated the limited
power of the creator over his creation that both of
these houses became fascinated with cybernetics.
The promise of universality of the cybernetic approach
was alluring; the unlimited applicability of cybernetics
evoked the image of unlimited power. But even greater
than the allure of cybernetics was the fear that cybernetics might become a weapon in the hands of the other side in the Cold War.
In the early 1950s, on the wave of Stalinist ideological campaigns against Western influence in Soviet science, the Soviet academic and popular press attacked
cybernetics as a modish pseudo-science and a reactionary imperialist utopia. Soviet critics used all tools
in their rhetorical arsenal: philosophical arguments
(accusing cybernetics of both idealistic and mechanistic deviations from dialectical materialism), sociological analysis (labeling cybernetics a technocratic
theory whose goal was to replace striking workers
with obedient machines), and moral invectives (alleging that cyberneticians aspired to replace conscienceladen soldiers with indifferent metallic monsters).
Like any propaganda, the anti-cybernetics discourse
was full of contradictions. Critics called cybernetics
not only an ideological weapon of imperialist reaction
but also a tool for accomplishing its aggressive military
plans, thus portraying it both as a pseudo-science and
as an efficient tool in the construction of modern automated weapons.
Khrushchevs political thaw after years of Stalins
rule opened the gates for liberalization in the scientific
community, and cybernetics was quickly rehabilitated.
Soviet cyberneticians radically expanded the boundaries of cybernetics to include all sorts of mathematical
models and digital computer simulations. Cybernetics
became synonymous with computers, and computers
synonymous with progress. In October 1961, just in
time for the opening of the Twenty-Second Congress
of the Communist Party, the Cybernetics Council of
the Soviet Academy of Sciences published a volume
appropriately entitled Cybernetics in the Service of Communism. This book outlined the great potential benefits of applying computers and cybernetic models to
problems in a wide range of fields, from biology and
medicine to production control, transportation, and
economics.
A large number of previously marginalized research
trends found a niche for themselves under the aegis of
the Academy Council on Cybernetics, including mathematical economics, which was refashioned into economic cybernetics. The entire Soviet economy was
interpreted as a complex cybernetic system, which
incorporates an enormous number of various interconnected control loops. Conceptualizing the Soviet
economy in cybernetic terms, economic cyberneticians regarded economic planning as a giant feedback
system of control. Economic cyberneticians aspired to
turn the Soviet economy into a fully controllable and
optimally functioning system by managing its information flows. Soviet cyberneticians proposed to optimize the functioning of this system by creating a large
number of regional computer centers to collect, process, and redistribute economic data for efficient planning and management. Connecting all these centers

feature

into a nationwide network would lead to the creation

of a single automated system of control of the national
economy.19

The new Party Program adopted at the Twenty-Second Congress included cybernetics among the
sciences that were called upon to play a crucial role in
the construction of the material and technical basis of
communism. The new Program vigorously asserted
that cybernetics, electronic computers, and control
systems will be widely applied in production processes in industry, building, and transport, in scientific
research, planning, designing, accounting, statistics,
and management. The popular press began to call
computers machines of communism.
However unusual this may sound to some conservatives who do not wish to comprehend elementary truths, we will be building communism on the basis
of the most broad use of electronic machines, capable of
processing enormous amounts of technological, economic, and biological information in the shortest time,
proclaimed Engineer Admiral Aksel Berg, Chairman of
the Academy Council on Cybernetics in 1962. These
machines, aptly called cybernetic machines, will solve
the problem of continuous optimal planning and control.20
Despite the lofty rhetoric of cybernetics enthusiasts,
Soviet government officials remained skeptical about
the prospects for a radical nationwide reform of economic management. The potential computerization
of economic decision-making threatened the established power hierarchy and faced stubborn opposition
at all levels of Soviet bureaucracy. Through an endless
process of reviews, revisions, and reorganizations,
Soviet government agencies were able to slow down the
cybernetic reform and eventually brought it to a halt.21
As the idea of an overall economic reform withered
away, so did the plans for a nationwide computer network, which no longer had a definite purpose.22

Yet the vociferous media campaign launched by

Soviet cybernetics advocates caused serious concern
in Washington. If any country were to achieve a completely integrated and controlled economy in which
cybernetic principles were applied to achieve various
goals, the Soviet Union would be ahead of the United
States in reaching such a state, wrote an American reviewer of Cybernetics in the Service of Communism. He
warned that cybernetics may be one of the weapons
Khrushchev had in mind when he threatened to bury
the West.23 The CIA set up a special branch to study
the Soviet cybernetics menace.24
CIA analysts apparently confused Soviet cyberneticians unbridled enthusiasm with actual government
policy. The CIA task force on Soviet cybernetics reported that Soviet policy makers took up the cybernetic
methodology on an unprecedented scale. The task
force warned that tremendous increments in economic productivity as the result of cybernetization of
production may permit disruption of world markets
on an unprecedented scale. In August 1961, senior CIA
research staff reported that the Soviets were ready to
apply cybernetic control techniques not only for the
natural sciences and the economy but for the shaping
of society as a whole.25 The cybernetic methodology

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35

of automated education was aimed at bringing up the

New Communist Man. The creation of a model society and the socio-economic demoralization of the West
will be the added ideological weapon, concluded CIA
analysts.26
On October 15, 1962, John J. Ford, head of the special
CIA task force on Soviet cybernetics, made an informal
presentation to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy
and other top government officials at the house of
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Ford captivated the audience by touting the serious threat to the
United States and Western Society posed by increasing Soviet commitment to a fundamentally cybernetic
strategy in the construction of communism. Everything went well until the presentation was interrupted
by the news of Soviet missiles discovered in Cuba.
Even as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded, top
Kennedy administration officials requested more information from Ford on Soviet cybernetics. On October
17, Ford submitted a summary of his unfinished talk to
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., President Kennedys Special Assistant. Speaking as a private citizen (the CIA did not take
an official position on Soviet cybernetics), Ford warned
that the Communists have a Bloc-wide program devoted to research, development and application of cybernetics to insure the outcome of the East-West conflict
in their favor, whereas the U.S. has neither a program,
nor a philosophy for developing cybernetics toward
attainment of national objectives. Persistent disregard of this aspect of Soviet strategy, concluded Ford,
amounts to arbitrary neglect of the central intentions of
the enemy and unwitting compliance with his principal
strategy for world communization.27
Three days later, with the missile crisis in full
swing, the cybernetics scare crept up the ladder of the
Kennedy administration. Schlesinger wrote to Robert
F. Kennedy that the all-out Soviet commitment to cybernetics would give the Soviets a tremendous advantage. Schlesinger warned that by 1970 the USSR
may have a radically new production technology, involving total enterprises or complexes of industries,
managed by closed-loop, feedback control employing self-teaching computers. If the American negligence of cybernetics continues, he concluded, we are
finished.28

In November 1962, as soon as the missile crisis

abated, Schlesinger raised the Soviet cybernetics issue
with the President himself. President Kennedy then
asked his Science Advisor Jerome Wiesner to set up a
cybernetics panel to take a look at what were doing
compared to what theyre doing, and what this means
for the future.29
Wiesner had headed the Department of Electrical
Engineering at MIT; he was well familiar with cybernetics, and regarded Norbert Wiener as his mentor.
Wiesner gathered top experts in the field. The prominent MIT biophysicist Walter Rosenblith chaired the
panel, which also included physiologist William Ross
Adey, psychologist George Miller, electronics engineer
John Pierce, mathematician John Tukey, computer
scientists Peter Elias and Willis Ware, and mathematical economists Leonid Hurwicz and Kenneth Arrow.
The panel met several times in 1963 until the Kennedy
assassination and Wiesners subsequent resignation
put an end to this study.30

The Cold War qua illness: The Kennedy administration was afflicted with the cybernetics scare.

36

essay

An apocalyptic vision of a fundamental transformation of the Soviet system along the lines of cybernetics was expressed in a manuscript entitled The
Communist Reformation, which Wiesner received
in February 1963. Cybernetics became officially the
primary science in the Soviet Union and the veritable
spearhead of Communist Reformation, claimed the
author, the Hungarian migr George Paloczi-Horvath.
The rise of primacy of cybernetics in all branches of
Soviet administration, economy, industry and science
started to change the Communist system of governing
and control itself. If a new crash programme is not
adopted very soon, warned Paloczi-Horvath, in the
late nineteen sixties and the early nineteen seventies
instead of the missile gap, American and Western public opinion will be worried by the computer-gap, and
the programmer-gap.31 Although Wiesner believed
that the idea of an emerging cybernetics gap was
ridiculous in the extreme,32 he did sponsor PalocziHorvaths further research and the publication of his
revised manuscript.33

In the meantime, the CIA continued to sound the

alarm. In February 1964, the CIA issued a secret report on Soviet cybernetics, mentioning, among other

strategic threats, the Soviet plans to build a Unified

Information Net. The CIA circulated the report to a
hundred people in the Defense Department, the State
Department, the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Security Agency, NASA, and other government
agencies.34 In November 1964, at a conference at Georgetown University, Ford publicly presented a paper
surveying Soviet cybernetics and predicting that the
development of new information techniques in government might become the battlefield for a new kind of
international competition during the next 15 years.35
His public call seriously alarmed some military officials.
The Commander of the Foreign Technology Division
of the U.S. Air Force Systems Command concluded:
Unless we Americans as a people, and we in the Air
Force in particular, understand these momentous
trends, we may not have much choice. The system
could be imposed upon us from an authoritarian, centralized, cybernated, world-powerful command and
control center in Moscow.36
CIA analysts wildly overestimated the Soviet cybernetics threat. A 1964 CIA report suggested that architects and engineers are now drawing up technical
plans for the center of the USSRs automated economic
information system to be located in Moscow on a site
already selected. 37 Indeed, the Central Economic

Mathematical Institute, created in Moscow in 1963 to

develop the concept of a computerized nationwide
economic management system, had no building of its
own, and its staff was crammed in a few rooms with no
computer facilities. The construction of a new building took more than 10 years; it was completed only in
the mid-1970s. A 1965 report warned that a decentralized network of satellite computer centers was being
created, in which the output of information processing
in one center was cross-fed into other satellite centers
and into a central computer. The report alleged that
these satellite centers would be interconnected on a
regional basis by 1967.38 A 1966 report claimed that the
Unified Information Network was the most significant
planned application of cybernetics discussed during
1965. The CIA identified 350 computer centers that
might become nodes in the nervous system of the
Soviet Government.39

In fact, the Soviet Union suffered from acute shortage of computers. In 1968 there were only 9 computers
in the entirety of Lithuania.40 The few lucky organizations that managed to obtain a computer held tight
control over its use and had no intention to share it with
outsiders. The so-called computer centers rarely had

THE LEGACY OF WIENER DURING AND AFTER

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE TWO SOCIAL SYSTEMS

hose who have suggested that

cybernetics died in connection
with the end of the Cold War
need to revise their views. Cybernetics is very much alive, although it
has evolved under new conditions.
The cybernetics phenomenon was
elucidated in November of 2008, in
Stockholm, when, for two days, some
seventy researchers were focused on
addressing the cybernetic heritage and
its relevance today.

conference included seven lectures which in various

ways illuminated and problematized the
history and future of cybernetics, as
well as the way in which varying conditions have pushed its development in
different directions. Andrew Pickering,
from the University of Exeter, critically
examined the British experience, and
showed that the matter occupied more
than simply the key players in the conflict between the two systems. Slava
Gerovitch from MIT surveyed cybernetics from an East-West perspective
the essay in this issue of BW is a
reworked version of his presentation
for the conference. The relationship
between bioethics and cybernetics was
discussed by Joanna Zylinska from the
University of London, while the relationship between cybernetics and systems
The first day of the

theory was interrogated by Vessel

Misheva from Uppsala University. Jasia
Reichardt spoke of how she, in 1960s
London, was part of the rebellious art
world and how cybernetics was part
of the concretist creative universe of
artists and poets of that time.
These lectures took place in the interior of the Nobel Museum. They were
monitored from the ceiling by a stream
of images of Nobel Prize laureates
which slowly moved over the participants in an ingenious technical design

of the conference, at
Sdertrn University, consisted of short
presentations by approximately twenty
researchers primarily from Europe, the
U.S., and Russia. Mathematician Norbert Wiener (18941964) is often claimed to be the father of cybernetics. He
died suddenly during a visit in Stockholm in the middle of the Cold War. It
is said that this took place on the stairs
leading up to the Royal Institute of
Technology. The Stockholm conference
could be seen as a belated tribute to
Wiener, 45 years after his death.

The second day

rebecka lettevall
Chairperson of the BW editorial
advisory board

more than one machine and were not linked to any network. In 1967 the Central Economic Mathematical Institute received its very first computer, Ural-14B, a slow,
unreliable machine with small memory, totally unsuitable for large-scale information processing. Lacking
its own building, the Institute installed the computer
in a local high school. The first network the Institute
developed consisted of two computers. This was a
forced measure: since the capabilities of Ural-14B were
so limited, the Institute linked it to the more powerful
BESM-6 computer, located at the Institutes Leningrad
branch, to enable running a few experimental simulations. In the mid-1960s, Soviet cybernetic economists
tried to persuade the leadership of the Ministry of Defense, which was building its own network, to convert
it to dual use. The reply was curt: We are getting as
much money for technological development as we ask
for. You are getting nothing. If we cooperate, neither
of us will get any money.41 With the lack of political
and financial support, the Institute soon dropped the
automated economic management information system from its research agenda and focused on the development of optimal mathematical models. Practical
reform was supplanted by optimization on paper.
Though short-lived, the Wiesner panel made a sober
evaluation of Soviet cybernetics. The leading economist on the panel, the future Nobel laureate Kenneth
Arrow, dismissed Soviet efforts at mathematical economic planning as no more that the aggregate of operations research work being done in the United States by
industrial corporations. He stressed that even though
the Soviets were collecting extensive economic data,
nobody has really been able to figure out how to make
good use of this enormous pile of material. Arrow was
highly skeptical of the claims of computer-based rationality and argued that even if the United States could
computerize our political decision-making, the
economy would not achieve perfect stability. He
concluded that a much more efficient economic policy
could be worked out simply by improving intelligence,
while computers might serve merely as a mystical symbol of accuracy.42 In 1964, soon after leaving
his position as Presidents Science Advisor, Wiesner
visited the Soviet Union to see the fruits of what he
called the cybernetics binge 43 for himself. The only
modern automated production facility he could find
was a champagne bottling plant.44

Herbert Simon, another future Nobel laureate in

Stream of images
of Nobel Prize
laureates.

economics and a leading artificial intelligence expert,

was also involved in the work of the cybernetics panel.
He later recalled how the CIA had submitted a thick
report to President Kennedy about an alleged great
Soviet plot to conquer the world with cybernetics.
[...] Alas, our panel was too honest. If we had reported
back to Wiesner that the Soviet cybernetics project was
genuinely dangerous, American research in artificial
intelligence would have had all the funding it could
possibly use for years to come. Putting temptation behind us, we reported that the CIA document was a fairy
story as events proved it to be.45
Whether the panelists were able to put the temptation behind or not, U.S. research in artificial intelligence
did receive a very significant boost at the time. Starting
in 1963, the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at the Defense Departments Advanced Re-

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37

search Projects Agency (ARPA) lavishly funded Project

MAC at MIT and other artificial intelligence initiatives.
It was heaven, MITs Marvin Minsky recalled. It was
your philanthropic institute run by your students with
no constraints and no committees. Of course there was
no way to spend that much money, so we built some
machines and for the next few years I never had to
make any hard decisions whether to fund one project
or another because we could just do both.46

The head of IPTO, MIT psychologist J. C. R. Licklider, had a longtime interest in cybernetics. There
was tremendous intellectual ferment in Cambridge after World War II, he recalled. Norbert Wiener ran a
weekly circle of 40 or 50 people who got together. They
would gather together and talk for a couple of hours.
I was a faithful adherent to that. Licklider audited
Wieners lectures and became part of a faculty group at
MIT that got together and talked about cybernetics.
I was always hanging onto that, he remembered.
Licklider closely collaborated with George Miller and
Walter Rosenblith, future members of Wiesners cybernetics panel. While at MIT, Licklider was also very close
to Wiesner, and when the latter became President
Kennedys Science Advisor, Licklider was appointed
the head of a panel on scientific and technical communications. Licklider thus divided his time between
ARPA and Wiesners Office of Science and Technology,
to some chagrin on the part of his Pentagon bosses.47
Lickliders combined interest in psychology, computing, and communications helped him conceptualize the computer as a communication device,
rather than merely a big calculator. In his 1960 article,
Man-Computer Symbiosis, he outlined his vision of
a network of thinking centers, multi-user computer
timesharing systems, which would incorporate the
functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval
and [man-computer] symbiotic functions.48 Lickliders biological metaphor of symbiosis echoed the
cybernetic blurring of human-machine boundaries. As
Lickliders article achieved the status of a unifying reference point in computer science and artificial intelligence, it spread the cybernetic vision (without using
the term) throughout these disciplines.49
The cybernetic concept of communication transcended the boundary between human and machine.
In the cybernetic world, people could communicate
via and with computers, eventually forming seamless
human-computer communication networks. Licklider
vigorously promoted human-computer interaction to
Pentagon officials. The problems of command and
control were essentially problems of man-computer
interaction. I thought it was just ridiculous to be having command control systems based on batch processing, he recalled. Every time I had the chance to talk, I
said the mission is interactive computing.50 The IPTO
funded a plethora of projects around the United States,
and each group developed its own time-sharing computing system, incompatible with others. Licklider
jokingly named this conglomerate of research groups
the Intergalactic Computer Network. In 1963, he sent
a memo to members of this informal social network,
urging them to standardize their systems so that data
could be communicated from one system to another.
Consider the situation in which several different cent-

Russian abacuses were in use well into the Internet Age.

ers are netted together, he wrote, arguing that it was

important to develop a capability for integrated network operation.51
In 1968, Licklider co-authored the article The
Computer as a Communication Device with Robert
Taylor, the head of IPTO in 196569. Under Taylor, the
IPTO took practical steps to unite digitally isolated
research groups into a supercommunity by developing the ARPANET, which eventually evolved into the
Internet.52

Historian Paul Edwards has argued that cyborg

discourse, which blurred the boundary between human and machine, blended with the Cold War closed
world discourse, which represented the world as amenable to computer simulation, manipulation, and control. Cyborg discourse functioned as the psychological/subjective counterpart of closed-world politics,
he writes. Where closed-world discourse defined the
architectures of a political narrative and a technological system, cyborg discourse molded culture and subjectivity for the information age.53 Ironically, cyborg
discourse achieved its triumph at the cost of erasing
its roots in Wieners cybernetic vision. Wieners reso-

the cybernetics
scare and
the origins
of the internet

Several Nobel Prize laureates were drawn into the attempt to create a defense against the cybernetics threat.

38
lute pacifist stance after Hiroshima brought him under
close FBI watch and cast a shadow of suspicion over his
ideas. The subsequent cybernetics scare in the United
States further tinged this field with the red of communism, and set hurdles for federal funding of cybernetics research. They wanted to chase out cybernetics
as fast as they could, recalled the leading cybernetician Heinz von Foerster. It was not suppressed, but
they neglected it.54 Although the ARPANET originated
in the context of cybernetic analogies between human
and computer communication, its cybernetic genealogy was obliterated.
While in the Soviet Union cyberspeak dominated
scientific discussions, cyborg discourse in the United
States seeped through culture and became universally accepted to the point of being invisible. American
scientists talked in cyberspeak and didnt even realize it, just as Monsieur Jourdain in Molires play
did not realize he was speaking in prose. The initial
ARPANET goals were very humble to share computing resources among research groups and dissociated from the explicit cybernetic vision of society as a
feedback-regulated mechanism. Perhaps precisely for
this reason it proved feasible, while the grand designs
of Soviet cyberneticians to build a nationwide computer network to regulate the entire national economy
ran into insurmountable political obstacles.

The Internet the ultimate cybernetic machine

has weaved together humans and computers, control
and communication, information and free speech. Just
as Wiener envisioned, digital communication can be
used both to liberate and to control, and authoritarian
governments still try to limit free circulation of information. Artificial organs, online avatars, and ubiquitous computing have made cybernetic human-machine
metaphors almost literal. Wieners cybernetic vision of
society based on free exchange of information has become (cyber)reality on the World Wide Web.
This story is profoundly ironic: America rejected
cybernetics but implemented the cybernetic vision,
while the Soviet Union did just the opposite: it paid lip
service to cybernetics and stalled practical cybernetic
projects. The cybernetics scare both focused the attention of U.S. science administrators on human-machine
interaction and made explicit cybernetic references
ideologically suspect. As a result, Americans pursued a
narrowly defined but viable technical project, while the
Soviets aimed at a utopian grand reform. This teaches
us something about the power of discourse: it resides
not so much in overt declarations but in subtle metaphors that change our mode of thinking and ultimately
reshape our world.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the organizers of the 2008 conference
Thinking and Making Connections: Cybernetic Heritage in the Social and Human Sciences at the Nobel
Museum and Sdertrn University, where an early
version of this paper was presented. I am very grateful
to Flo Conway, Jim Siegelman, and Ben Peters for
kindly sharing their archival findings with me. I also
appreciate the helpful comments and suggestions
by Rebecka Letteval and an anonymous reviewer of
Baltic Worlds.

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54Quoted in Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero, p. 321.

the cybernetics
scare and
the origins
of the internet

It is said that the Web turns 20 in 2009. Office telephones have become mute.